The use of facsimile transmission equipment has been steadily increasing over recent years. Facsimile transmission is a very convenient mechanism of transmitting documents and images from one location to another in near real time. The almost instantaneous transmission speed of facsimile transmission equipment is a huge advantage over regular conventional mail delivery and accounts for the immense popularity of facsimile as the transmission mechanism of choice in many business.
With the exploding use of facsimile equipment today, there are many businesses that conduct a substantial amount of their business through facsimile transmissions. In addition, many businesses and government agencies use facsimile equipment to send and receive data on a daily basis. These same companies typically also employ sophisticated telephone systems for handling their high volume of inbound and outbound telephone calls. Many businesses such as banking institutions, insurance companies and government entities have an additional requirement of recording and archiving telephone conversations occurring on company telephones. The necessity of recording telephone calls might be required for any number of reasons such as security, liability, eavesdropping, etc. Telephone archiving systems exist today and are employed by many businesses to record, on a long term basis, all internal and external telephone calls.
As with voice telephone call long term storage and retrieval, there is a long felt need by many businesses to be able to store on a long term basis, both inbound and outbound facsimile transmissions. Facsimile storage systems exist in the prior art however none disclose the long term storage, archival and retrieval of facsimile transmissions.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,935,955, issued to Neudorfer, discloses a system for interfacing central office telephone lines with internal facsimile machines. Incoming facsimile transmission data is placed in a memory temporary storage area after being received and before being transmitted. Facsimile transmissions are deleted from the storage after they are transmitted.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,235,433, issued to Clarkson et al., discloses a system and method for automatically indexing facsimile transmissions into an image management system by applying telephony data accompanying the facsimile transmission to index the transmission by use of a substitution table.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,357,562, issued to Metser et al., discloses an automated facsimile/voice memory managing system which includes a facsimile board, a voice response board, a storage device and central processing unit (CPU). The storage means disclosed, however, is used to store facsimile transmission on a temporary basis.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,014,300, issued to Harvath et al., discloses a facsimile store and forward network that includes a network access device and an address processing unit that cooperates to interface an originating facsimile machine with a store and forward inbound node. Facsimile transmission, however, are stored on a temporary basis only.
Another potential problem that exists in present facsimile transmission storage devices is that if the facsimile transmission equipment is using a proprietary non-standard facsimile protocol, it becomes impossible to receive and store it without knowledge of the protocol. One solution to this problem is to have the facsimile transmission recording equipment determine the facsimile protocol to use and subsequently instruct the two facsimile machines accordingly.